Well this year was a dumpster fire, wasn’t it?
But at least it wasn’t all bad. All things considering the Cultural Hall had a phenomenal year with some of the best shows we’ve done yet.
Here’s a list of our top 10 episodes from 2020, in case you missed any of them and need something to do while you’re bunkered down in your home waiting for the pandemic to pass.
After all, we all know that Tiger King isn’t good on a second watch anyway.
10. Taylor Petrey (Episode #409)
Taylor G. Petrey is an associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College and author of Tabernacles of Clay: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Mormonism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). He is the author and editor of several books on religion and gender, including the Routledge Handbook on Mormonism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 2020) and is the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He holds a doctorate of theology from Harvard Divinity School, where he has also been a visiting assistant professor.
Listen to the episode here.
9. Patrick Mason (Episode #468)
Patrick Q. Mason holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at USU. He has written or edited several books, including Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion (Cambridge University Press, 2019); What Is Mormonism? A Student’s Introduction (Routledge, 2017); Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, co-edited with John Turner (Oxford University Press, 2016); Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century (University of Utah Press, 2016); and The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He was a Fulbright Scholar in Romania in 2015 and is a past president of the Mormon History Association. Professor Mason is frequently consulted by the national and international media on stories related to Mormon culture and history. He teaches courses on Mormonism, American religious history, the history of Christianity, and religion, violence, and peacebuilding.
Listen to the episode here.
8. Benjamin Park (Episode #397)
Benjamin E. Park received his doctorate in history from Cambridge University and teaches American religious history at Sam Houston State University. His scholarly work has been published by over a dozen academic journals, and his public writing has appeared in Washington Post, Newsweek, Salt Lake Tribune, and other venues. He is the co-editor of Mormon Studies Review, and is completing A Companion to American Religious History with Blackwell-Wiley. His new book, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier, was published by W.W. Norton/Liveright, and has been reviewed in, among other places, Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker.
Listen to the episode here.
7. Joanna Brooks (Episode #411)
To this day, churchgoing Mormons report that they hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African-Americans are the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits–due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence–were destined to come to earth with a “curse” of black skin. This claim can be made in many Mormon Sunday Schools without fear of contradiction. You are more likely to encounter opposition if you argue that the ban on the ordination of Black Mormons was a product of human racism. Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, says Joanna Brooks, the priesthood and temple ban on Blacks has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth-telling, and determined silence.
As America begins to come to terms with the costs of white privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring white people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people’s history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.
Listen to the episode here.
6. McKay Coppins (Episode #384)
McKay Coppins is an American journalist and author who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. In 2012, Coppins was one of the Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” media pundits and listed along with three other young BuzzFeed News journalists as one of Politico’s “ten breakout reporters of 2012.” He is a regular contributor to CNN and MSNBC.
Listen to the episode here.
5. Miles Harvey (Episode #425)
Miles Harvey is the author of the national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps and the recipient of a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan. His book Painter in a Savage Land was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Booklist Editors’ Choice. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.
Listen to the episode here.
4. Terryl and Fiona Givens (Episode #473)
Robert MacFarlane has written that language does not just register experience, it produces it. Our religious language in particular informs and shapes our understanding of God, our sense of self, and the way we make sense of our challenging path back to loving Heavenly Parents. Unfortunately, to an extent we may not realize, our religious vocabulary has been shaped by prior generations whose creeds, in Joseph Smith s words, have filled the world with confusion.
I make all things new, proclaimed the Lord. Regrettably, many are still mired in the past, in ways we have not recognized. In this book, Fiona and Terryl Givens trace the roots of our religious vocabulary, explore how a flawed inheritance compounds the wounds and challenges of a life devoted to discipleship, and suggest ways of reformulating our language in more healthy ways all in the hope that, as B. H. Roberts urged, we may all cooperate in the works of the Spirit to find a truer expression of a gospel restored.
Listen to the episode here.
3. Josh Holt (Episodes #421 and 422)
Waking up to an AK47 pointed in his face was just the beginning. The next 2 years in a Venezualan would test him physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Why was he arrested? How could they keep him for so long without doing anything wrong? When would he be able to return to the United States?
Listen to the episode here and here.
2. Janice Kapp Perry (Episode #444)
The story of my writing this hymn based on President Nelson’s conference address, “Hear Him” (words by David B. Larsen), will be published alongside this hymn in a beautiful new book by the same title coming from Covenant Communications in October. My first attempt failed and was discarded. My second attempt, after pleading prayer, provided me with a significant experience in “hearing Him” which I will never forget. The first two lines (in a minor key) reflect the depth of the prophet’s plea for us to hear Him! The last two lines (in a major key) tell of the blessings that will follow as we truly hear Him!
Janice Kapp Perry is a composer, songwriter, and author. She is most notable for her work related to her membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She has written over 3,000 songs, some of which appear in the church’s official hymnal, Children’s Songbook, and many personal albums, songbooks, and musicals. Some of her most well-known songs include “I Love to See the Temple”, “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus”, and “A Child’s Prayer”. Perry has also composed albums in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Listen to the episode here.
1. Joseph Freeman (Episode #417)
Joseph Freeman, Jr. (born July 24, 1952) was the first man of black African descent to receive the Melchizedek priesthood and be ordained an elder in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after the announcement of the 1978 Revelation on Priesthood, which allowed “all worthy male members of the Church” to “be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.
Listen to the episode here.
Honorable Mentions!
Although we felt pretty da*ng good about our top 10 episodes from this year, we wanted to give a quick shout out to two other episodes of ours as well.
Don Bradley (Episode #372)
Don Bradley is an author and independent historian specializing in the beginnings of the Latter-day Saint Restoration. He completed a Bachelor’s in History at BYU and a Master’s in History at Utah State University, where he wrote his thesis on “American Proto-Zionism and the ‘Book of Lehi’: Recontextualizing the Rise of Mormonism.” Don has performed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project working with the earliest Joseph Smith sources. He was the primary researcher for Brian C. Hales’s Joseph Smith’s Polygamy series. He has published on the translation of the Book of Mormon, plural marriage before Nauvoo, Joseph Smith’s “grand fundamental principles of Mormonism,” and the Kinderhook plates, and has forthcoming works on the Kinderhook plates and the First Vision. He lives in Springville, Utah.
Don Bradley presents over a decade of historical and scriptural research to not only tell the story of the lost pages but to reconstruct many of the detailed stories written on them.
Listen to the episode here.
Richard Turley (Episode #413)
Richard E. Turley Jr. retired on March 31, 2020, after a long career in which he oversaw the Church History, Family History, Public Affairs, and Church Communication Departments of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has authored or edited numerous books on Latter-day Saint and Western U.S. history and helped create the Church Historian’s Press, the Joseph Smith Papers, FamilySearch, the Church History Library, and Saints: The History of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days.
Listen to the episode here.
Thank You, Everyone, Who Has Sat With Us This Year!
If a show in podcast form doesn’t have an audience does it make a noise?
Probably not.
Each and every one of you makes The Cultural Hall what it is. Thank you all so much for spending this year with us. We have big plans for the next year and can’t wait to nourish and strengthen (and be nourished and strengthened) with/by you!
We hope you keep listening and follow us on whatever social media platform you hang out on the most.
And of course, you can always help support the show by becoming a Patron.
Can’t wait to see all of you in 2021 on the back row of the Cultural Hall!